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How Nascent Occupations Construct a Mandate:

The Case of Service Designers’ Ethos

Anne-Laure Fayard

Tandon School of Engineering, New York University

Ileana Stigliani Imperial College Business School

London, UK

Beth Bechky

Stern Business School, New York University

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INTRODUCTION

Occupations are fluid and evolving, often fighting among themselves for legitimacy and

recognition during times of occupational change (Abbott 1988, Hughes 1958, Bucher and

Strauss, 1961). In the course of contestation, task boundaries shift between multiple segments of

occupations (Bucher 1962, 1988). Whether or not occupations are victorious in their battles for

resources and jurisdiction, they all begin by establishing an occupational mandate for practicing

(Hughes, 1958; Nelsen and Barley, 1997). This mandate, defined as the internally shared

understanding and the externally perceived right to define “proper conduct,” as well as values,

beliefs, and ways of thinking (Hughes, 1958), provides the cultural underpinnings for an

occupation’s legitimacy. Thus, understanding how an occupational mandate is constructed –

even by those groups that might not cohere into solidly institutionalized occupations (Bucher,

1988: 141) – is vital to our knowledge of occupational change. However, research on how new

occupations gain such a mandate is still scant. This lacuna is particularly glaring given the

current climate of burgeoning occupational change, in which new occupations surface while

others fade, fuse together or redefine themselves.

Overall, the number of new and revised occupations documented in the U.S. Standard

Occupational Classification system now comprises 974 categories, compared to the 503

occupational categories introduced in 1977. While opportunities for traditional employment are

decreasing (Kalleberg, 2011), there is a proliferation of new and redefined occupations such as

consultants (Werr and Styhre 2003), fundraisers, and web developers (Watson, 2013). In today’s

service economy where technology has become ubiquitous, new occupations cannot solely rely

on skills and technical expertise as sources of differentiation. In the context of such changes,

then, how do new occupations become legitimate?

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In this paper, we investigate what practitioners of a new occupation do to become recognized

and construct an occupational mandate. We draw on an inductive qualitative study of the nascent

occupation of service design, which uses design principles to help clients improve existing

services or develop new ones in instances as varied as the facilitation of a more patient- focused

healthcare experience to the design of a unique travel experience for airline customers (Mager

2004; Moritz 2005). Our findings enhance our understanding of the jurisdictional strategies of

emerging occupations by showing how members of this occupation constructed their

occupational mandate by demonstrating a specific ethos, i.e., particular values enacted through

work practices. Our study highlights the important role played by values in the construction of an

occupational mandate, in particular in cases of occupations where skills and expertise are not the

main differentiator.

Occupational transformation and the importance of an occupational mandate

Occupations are in constant motion, frequently developing through shifts in task jurisdiction.

They are composed of segments that continuously emerge, evolve, endure, and die (Bucher and

Strauss, 1961; Strauss, 1978; Bazanger, 1990). Scholars taking an interactionist approach

(Bucher and Strauss, 1961; Blumer, 1969; Strauss, 1978; Hall, 1972) emphasize “the social and

interpersonal processes involved in the definition, maintenance and restructuring of social roles”

(Rothman, 1979, p. 495). While they argue that triggers for occupational emergence are multiple

– e.g., new technologies, a vacuum left by another occupation, the hiving off of “dirty work”

(Bucher and Strauss, 1961; Bucher, 1988; Hughes, 1984; Zetka, 2003, 2011) – they show that

fledgling occupations all go through a similar process of emergence. This process comprises

several stages: finding like-minded colleagues, gaining an occupational mandate for activities,

and legitimizing and solidifying an occupational jurisdiction (Bucher, 1988).

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Much research demonstrates how occupations solidify their jurisdiction through a variety of

political, rhetorical, and expertise-related strategies. Occupations institutionalize, forming

associations and leveraging their political power to control membership (Begun and Lippincott,

1987; Kronus, 1976; Halpern, 1992; Gross and Kieser, 2006; Kipping and Saint-Martin, 2005;

McKenna, 2006). They make claims through abstract and formal knowledge (Abbott, 1988,

Foucault, 1963; Hughes, 1984) and frame their expertise to convince audiences to grant them

authority over task domains (Power, 1997; Lawrence, 2004; Gross and Kieser, 2006; Alvesson

and Roberston, 2006).

Take one example of a well-studied occupation: Recent research on accountants suggests that

political, rhetorical, and knowledge-based strategies have helped them expand their jurisdiction

beyond traditional activities in their field. Lawrence (2004) documents how Canadian public

accountants, who were not perceived as legitimate by other actors in the field (i.e., lawyers and

engineers), framed a role for their occupation in the emerging field of environmental audits. For

example, they created a professional association, which, although open to all, was dominated by

accountants. The association (and the newsletter it published) was instrumental in defining what

an environmental audit professional was and including in this definition people with accounting

backgrounds. Accountants also used a quarterbacking strategy: Because of their experience with

audits, accountants could take the lead in putting together project teams, connecting technical

and legal professionals with clients, and thus become full members of the emerging occupational

field. Similarly, Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) show how Big Five accounting firms tried to

legitimize a new organizational form of multi-professional practice using rhetorical strategies

aimed to appeal to the market. Accountants were able to solidify and expand their occupational

jurisdiction through field-level political and framing moves.

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Although less studied than the solidification of jurisdiction, a key early phase in the

occupational emergence process is the construction of an occupational mandate that is shared

internally and recognized externally. Hughes (1984) defines an occupational mandate as both

developing a shared understanding among members of an occupation and convincing others:

Generally, if the people in the occupation have any sense of identity and solidarity, they

will . . . claim a mandate to define—not merely for themselves, but for others as well—proper conduct with respect to the matters that concern their work. They also seek to define and possibly succeed in defining, not merely proper conduct but even modes of

thinking and belief that everyone individually and for the body social and politic with respect to some broad area of life which they believe to be in their occupational domain.

(Italics in the original; p. 287) Internally, members develop solidarity, which Bucher (1988:136) calls “discovering

colleagueship,” by forming around an impetus for change that triggers the emergence of a new

occupation. These colleagues share a common culture, “a set of values, norms and perspectives

that apply to but extend beyond work related matters” (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984: 287).

These shared values, they believe, distinguish them from other occupations (Bucher, 1988; 1962;

Bucher and Strauss, 1961).

Externally, when it comes to convincing others, the occupational mandate provides its

members the license “to carry out certain activities rather different from those of other people

and to do so in exchange for money, goods and services” (Hughes, 1984: 287). The mandate lets

occupational members define suitable answers to questions of practice within their occupational

domain (Hughes, 1958; McMurray, 2011). Once a mandate is established, practitioners’ sense of

solidarity and identity gives them moral authority to claim that their ways of conduct and

thinking related to the work are appropriate and relevant (McMurray, 2011:802). In both aspects

of the mandate – internal and external – values infuse what is defined as “proper conduct,” as

well as modes of thinking and beliefs.

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Despite the need for a mandate to lay the ground work for legitimizing and solidifying an

occupational jurisdiction, scholars have paid much less attention to how occupations construct an

occupational mandate. Indeed, as stressed by a few scholars (Dingwall, 1983, Nelsen and Barley,

1997; Sherman, 2010), how occupations initially form and come to be recognized is a question

largely omitted in the sociology of work. This omission has had two unfortunate consequences

for our understanding of occupational change: we know little about early processes of

occupational emergence, and we lack a deep understanding of the cultural and moral aspects of

gaining legitimacy.

The first consequence reflects the emphasis of the current literature on investigating

occupations which have already been institutionalized. The research describing both the triggers

for occupational development and the tactics that occupations pursue to extend or change their

jurisdiction are typically focused on occupations’ later institutionalized stages when their main

activities concern solidification, as can been seen in the studies of accounting described earlier.

The focus on these later stages may be because gaining access to data about early stages is

difficult (Nelsen and Barley, 1997). As a result, how new occupations in these early stages

achieve social recognition by developing an occupational mandate with values and aspirations

central for their work (Hughes, 1958) is underexplored. Our study aims to provide insights into

early dynamics of emergence by describing how service designers construct their occupational

mandate.

Furthermore, we know little about the role of values in the construction of an occupational

mandate, because most studies do not focus on the interactions and work practices of

occupational members. Previous studies of occupational jurisdiction have largely focused on the

public face of occupations and their position in the larger institutional field. For instance, some

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scholars have tracked the dynamics of occupational power and control through analyses of public

statements, political activities, and association formation (Kronus, 1976; Halpern, 1992). Others

have investigated the rhetorical and representational strategies used by occupations to seek

legitimacy (Power, 1997; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). By focusing on publicly available

archival data scholars have explored the external and public aspects of the occupational mandate

(e.g. obtaining jurisdictional monopoly or licensing requirements), but they have not been able to

cast light on the internal ones (i.e. finding like-minded colleagues), and hence on the role of

values.

For instance, in a recent study of management consulting firms, Kipping (2011) explained

how management consulting companies relied on branding efforts (e.g. direct advertising,

advertising for recruiting events, publishing books and carrying out high-exposure projects) to

create an image of professionalism for the occupation. Using historical and contemporary studies

of the management consulting industry and archival data from the Management Consultancies

Association in the UK allowed him to capture public claims by the leading members of the

occupation “to have assembled the true elite of the industry” (2011: 531). However, this data

does not uncover any of the values that management consultants might associate with this image

of professionalism.

Because values are not observable per se but tend to be articulated through discourse during

activity, to study values and their role in the construction of an occupational mandate we cannot

rely on public statements, but we need to look at what members of occupations say and do, as

well as the interactions between both. Rather than “conceptualiz[ing] occupational roles as

merely a configuration of technical or intellectual operations within an overall economic division

of labor” (Rothman, 1979: 495), we need to focus on the interaction work between different

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occupations, which involves a closer look at work practices in general.

Recent occupational scholarship in the interactionist tradition has explored how members of

occupational groups construct their social worlds. These studies focus on work practices and the

interaction order—i.e., patterns of situated action, interaction, and interpretation (Goffman,

1983)—to investigate cross-occupational dynamics in workplaces and occupations outside of

traditional professions (e.g., Bechky, 2003; 2006; Nelsen and Barley, 1997; Zabusky and Barley,

1997). Because this approach explores how daily work practices are imbued with meaning,

symbols, and values (Bechky, 2011), we believe it could help cast much needed light on the

process of achieving an occupational mandate.

Potential legitimizing strategies for nascent occupations: values and material practices

Interactionist scholarship attends to how the workplace is constructed and negotiated through

interaction among actors and suggests that much of our daily workplace activity is permeated by

occupational values and identity (Strauss 1978, Hughes 1958). The entanglement of values and

work practices has implications for the legitimacy of occupations. Some recent studies show how

occupational members maintain legitimacy internally and externally by enacting their values in

practices (Anteby, 2010; Barley, 1983). For instance, Anteby’s study of commerce in cadavers

(2010) highlights the importance of moral values and material distinctions in distinguishing

different groups of practitioners. Practitioners in New York state who controlled the task

jurisdiction adhered to a certain moral code in their practices, only accepting corpses that had

been given with personal consent as opposed to those with consent of the family and “never

removing fingernail polish from a cadaver so the medical students remember that this cadaver is

somebody” (2010: 624). They viewed this material treatment of cadavers and trading partners as

a legitimizing moral distinction and used this practice to prevent other practitioners from gaining

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a foothold in the field. Similarly, Barley (1983) illustrates the role of value- laden practices in

legitimizing the work of funeral home directors. Through various practices—preparing the

corpse to give it a lifelike appearance, organizing chapels to create a home y feeling, and

avoiding noises when removing the body from a personal home—funeral directors aimed to

make funeral scenes “natural” to the family and friends and to diminish the negative emotions

associated with death.

Given that values enacted through practices are useful in maintaining occupational legitimacy,

we suggest that they may also be a means for carving a mandate during early occupational

emergence. Indeed, a couple of examples of professionalization suggest that occupations have

used this strategy. For instance, Nelsen and Barley (1997), in their comparative study of

voluntary and paid emergency medical technicians (EMTs), demonstrate how distinctive ways of

talking and acting helped persuade relevant audiences of the legitimacy of paid EMT work. For

example, their demeanor when interacting with patients—turning off the radio during the drive to

the hospital, sitting quietly by the patient at the hospita l, filling in written reports—aimed to

create a sense of professionalism that contrasted with the supposed amateurism of volunteers.

Similarly, Arndt and Bigelow (2005) describe the professionalization of the occupation of

hospital superintendents into hospital administrators. In the early 1900s, the male-dominated

professional association of hospital administrators succeeded in masculinizing the occupation,

which at the time was mostly female. They did so by forging a new set of male-gendered values

and work practices associated with the position: The work was reconceptualized and enacted as

rational and efficient rather than charitable and benevolent.

Inspired by these studies, we highlight the role that both values and material practices play in

the construction of an occupational mandate for emergent occupations. We show that values are

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important for establishing legitimacy, particularly when they are demonstrably intertwined with

material practices. In the case of service designers, their ethos (i.e., their values enacted through

material practices) was central to the construction of an occupational mandate. Service designers

differentiated themselves from traditional designers (with whom they shared some work

practices) and other occupations, like management consultants and marketers, who worked on

similar projects (e.g., redesigning brands, creating better customer experiences). Instead of

relying on a specific set of skills or mastering technology to create distinction, service designers

distinguished themselves through their ethos, i.e., a certain attitude enacted in a special way of

doing things.

METHODS

This project began in late 2009 as an interview-based study of service design that included

complementary observation and archival data collection. It expanded into a five-year project in

which we1 continued our involvement with the service design community on a regular basis. We

participated in various events about service design that were organized by service designers,

engaging in observations and impromptu conversations. We also developed relationships with a

few service designers with whom we regularly had informal conversations about their work. We

cultivated these relationships so we could be sensitive to the dynamics of the occupation, share

with them our provisional interpretations, and get feedback. Lastly, we read Touchpoint, the

official professional journal on service design, and followed the websites of many service design

consultancies. We also read newsletters sent by some of the major service design consultancies

and participated in online groups, such as the LinkedIn service design group, to monitor

conversations among service designers and their views about their work and others’ work. This

ongoing data collection complemented the more focused and intensive data collection that

1 The first 2 authors collected the data; the third author was actively engaged in the analysis phase.

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occurred in three main rounds over five years and allowed us to develop a thorough

understanding of the occupation as well as to collect many stories related to service-design

projects.

Research setting

Service design is an emerging occupation in which practitioners aim to understand customers

(also called users2), organizations, and markets; develop new or improved services and customer

experiences; translate them into feasible solutions; and then help organizations implement them

(Mager 2004; Moritz 2005; Kimbell, 2011). Examples of service-design projects include

designing travellers’ experience with an airline (from booking to check- in, travel, and arrival),

the patient’s experience in an emergency room, and a brand and its associated strategy. These

projects seek to connect the needs of customers with the capabilities of service providers,

envisioning the service as enacted in time and space through various touchpoints, the tangible

elements that make up the experience of using a certain service.3

The historical roots of service design date back to the academic activities and publications of

the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Shostack, 1984; Hollins and Hollins, 1991), when the idea of

designing services began to be referenced and the concept of a service blueprint (a specific tool

for designing services) arose. Then, in 1996, IDEO, an international design and innovation

consultancy, began to develop a strategy for a company that offered new, high-speed rail

services. Although they were originally hired to redesign the seats, the IDEO team quickly

realized that the train experience was more than just seating. It was a journey that started as soon

as the passengers began searching for trains and fares and ended after they left the train at their

2 We use “customers” or “users” interchangeably, in keeping with our informants’ use of the terms.

3 Touchpoints include spaces, objects, people, and interactions and take many forms: advertising cards, bills, retail

shops, call centers, and customer representatives, as well as web, mobile phone, and PC interfaces.

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destination (Brown, 2009). Although no one spoke of service design at the time, several of our

informants referred to that project as the first service design project.

Yet while its early seeds may have taken root in academia and practice, service design

remained underground until 2001, when the expression “service design” started being used

explicitly by Live Work, then a new, London-based company. Its founders had left their previous

jobs in interaction design to work on more strategic, broader projects than designing websites.

According to them, the term “service design” was born from their reflection on their work: They

were designers whose focus was on services so “service design” seemed an obvious fit. Over

time a burgeoning group of practitioners who called themselves “service designers” began

working on service-design projects. Identifying as generalists rather than specialists, they sought

to name the tasks, practices, tools, and techniques they required to design services. Our

informants stressed that they borrowed tools and techniques from several other occupations, such

as product design, branding, marketing, and theater (See the appendix for a detailed list).

Initially, service design included only a few consultancies such as Live Work and Engine

Service Design (which, according to our informants, were the first two service design

consultancies in London) and a handful of individuals working as freelancers. Service design has

since experienced rapid growth: Several European design schools have begun offering courses in

it, as have several in the US.4 New service design consultancies have been founded (initially in

the UK but now worldwide, thus creating new communities of practitioners across Europe, the

United States, and Asia Pacific), and some of the larger international design consultancies have

4 Examples include the Kö ln International School of Design, Linkoping’s University, Domus Academy, and the

Royal College of Art. SCAD in Savannah was the first university in the United States to offer bachelor’s and

master’s programs in service design. Other schools like Parsons New School and ITT Design Institute offer service -

design courses. Moreover, over time management scholars have been paying increasing attention to service design

and service innovation (Mager, 2004; Moritz, 2005; Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Vargo, Maglio and Akaka, 2008;

Lusch and Nambisan, 2015).

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started explicitly featuring service design among their offerings and practices. In 2004, the

Service Design Network (SDN) was created with the goal of becoming an international network

of academics, practitioners, and businesses promoting the development and spread of knowledge

and expertise in the field of service design; it became a nonprofit four years later. In 2009, SDN

launched a journal, Touchpoint, which is published three times a year and “provides a written

record of the ongoing discussions of the service design community. It aims at facilitating a forum

to debate, share, advance, and codify the field of service design and its practices. ”5 In summer

2010, the UK newspaper The Guardian published a supplement on service design featuring a

series of case studies in various domains, many of them involving our informants.

The number of service design related projects has continued to grow since the first projects

done by our informants and most of the consultancies and consultants we interviewed at the

origins of this study are still in business today. There are also signs that service design has

developed an occupational foothold and they are seen as distinct. In December 2015 Forrester

Research released a report entitled “Vendor Landscape: Service Design Agency Overview”

based on a survey of 70 service design agencies. They argued that although service design is far

from being a homogeneous discipline, the service design provider landscape has changed in the

last two years as it includes now not only small service design agencies concentrated in Europe,

but also “full-service design agencies and management consultancies claiming service design

among their offerings.” Indeed, in the last few years management consultancies like Accenture,

Deloitte, and EY have acquired service design consultancies (respectively Fjord, Doblin, and

Seren Partners) while explicitly keeping them independent, thus signaling that service design

provides a unique approach to the design of services. Yet, despite having gained an occupational

foothold, all our informants still refer to service design as “emerging” or in “its infancy.”

5 http://www.service-design-network.org/read/touchpoint/

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Practitioners describe their occupation as being in a constant state of flux: “What we do is

evolving. There can be very little argument that service design is finding itself in some odd

places these days, from working to reduce crime, to supporting disarmament processes, to

actively shaping public policy. We are finding ourselves enacting new roles and slipping over the

boundaries and borders of traditional disciplines.”6.

Data Collection

Our data collection combined open-ended interviews, non-participant observations, and

archival data.

Interviews. We were interested in the emergence of service design as a field, and this

consideration shaped the composition of our sample of informants (Glaser and Strauss 1967;

Locke 2001). Over a period of nearly five years, we conducted a total of fifty-five ethnographic

interviews (Spradley, 1979) in three rounds in order to progressively support our emerging

interpretations.

During the first round (February–August 2010), we conducted twenty-five interviews7. We

focused our attention on informants who had played a prominent role in the emergence of service

design (i.e. the founders of the first service design consultancies in the Greater London area), and

then, using snowball sampling (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) we progressively selected additional

informants (service designers working in consultancies or as freelancers) involved in the

occupation’s emergence and located in the same geographical area (service design as a field

originated in the greater London area).

6 Touchpoint 3#1 - Leaning, Changing, Growing. (Kindle Location 164). Service Design Network.

7 We conducted twenty-five interviews with twenty-one informants. Of the twenty-one, four were interviewed twice

so that we could discuss in more detail some of the insights that resulted from the first interview.

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Our second round (May 2012 - August 2012), which involved sixteen interviews, aimed at

gaining a better understanding of our emerging interpretations about how service designers were

constructing their mandate (with specific reference to values and practices). Having become

aware that the occupation was expanding in other geographical areas, we interviewed

practitioners located in New York (4), New Zealand (3) and Australia (2) as well as in London

(4). Some of the informants we talked to in the first round gave us names of practitioners in these

areas and we selected those who had had a central role in the emergence of service design in

those areas. Moreover, during some of the interviews conducted in the first round, informants

referred to the fact that some design schools had started offering programs on service design.

Considering this an important aspect of the development of the occupation, we also talked to

three academics teaching service design-related topics. Finally, we interviewed the project

manager for an airline service design project, as well as the lead designer on that project.

Finally, as occupational emergence also involves external recognition, we conducted a

third round of interviews (September–December 2014) both to provide a more nuanced

explanation of the service design process and of its practices and to gain the clients’ perspective

on the way service designers work. We asked some of our key informants for additional

interviews, during which they shared with us additional examples of projects they had worked

on. They also provided us with names of clients they had worked with, whom we then

interviewed. Some of these clients referred us to management consultants who had collaborated

with service designers on some big projects, and we also interviewed them. We conducted nine

focused interviews with seven clients and two management consultants to better understand their

perceptions about how service designers work in comparison with other occupations. In order to

further round out our interpretations of how the occupation had evolved since our project’s

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launch, we also interviewed a service designer and re-interviewed two service designers we had

spoken to in previous phases.

Interviews lasted between one to two hours and were recorded and transcribed. The first two

rounds of interviews followed an open-ended protocol covering the background (education and

previous experience) of the informants, their role in the development of the occupation of service

design, their definition of the field, what it meant to work as service designers, with detailed

description of specific projects. The third round of interviews was aimed at capturing the clients

and management consultants’ perceptions about service designers’ work and at enriching our

developing interpretations. We refer here to informants and service design consultancies by

pseudonym to guarantee anonymity. Table 1 provides a summary of the three rounds of

interviews.

----------------------------------

Insert Table 1 about here

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Observations. When visiting service designers on company premises, we were often offered

a tour of the work space. After each visit, we recorded field notes of our observations about the

physical setting and the tools they used. We attended six meetings organized by some of our

informants’ service design consultancies, including brainstorming sessions, internal knowledge-

sharing meetings, and other work-related meetings. In the last few years, we also participated in

conferences (3), talks (12), and workshops (9) on service design organized by the Service Design

Network (SDN) as well as by service designers. We attended major service design events such as

the Global Service Jam, “a non-profit volunteer activity organized by an informal network of

service design aficionados, who all share a common passion for growing the field of service

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design and customer experience.”8 We also went to several social events such as “Service Design

Thinks and Drinks” or “Service Design Salon” hosted by service designers in London and New

York. Finally, the first author has followed the New York chapter of the SDN since its inception,

attending events and informally meeting with some of its founders. These activities helped us

establish trust with informants and provided us with a rich understanding of the service design

community because practitioners often shared stories about their projects and client relationships.

Archival Data. We conducted extensive reviews of the websites of the service design

consultancies for which our informants worked, the Service Design Network (SDN), and the

Service Design Group on LinkedIn. We read all issues (April 2009–December 2014) of

Touchpoint, the international journal of service design published by the SDN, and many service

designers’ blogs and personal websites, where numerous online discussions and debates about

the nature of service design took place. In addition, our informants shared press articles,

corporate brochures, books, pamphlets, and internal and external presentations intended for

specific projects. Archival data was used to triangulate and integrate the evidence derived from

interviews and observations (Glaser & Strauss 1967:65). Table 2 provides detailed information

on the data sources and their use in data analysis.

----------------------------------

Insert Table 2 about here

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Data Analysis

In analyzing the data, we used an inductive approach built on constant comparison and

contrast (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Miles and Huberman, 1994; Strauss and Corbin 1990). We

used interview transcripts and field notes from observations as primary data for the analysis and

archival data to support and refine emerging themes. We coded independently and then

8 http://planet.globalservicejam.org/content/about

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compared and discussed the recurring themes, fine-tuning our interpretations and occasionally

recoding some of the data.

Initially, the analysis consisted of multiple readings of the interview transcripts and field

notes. From interviews with early practitioners of service design, a narrative about their

frustration vis-à-vis the status quo surfaced: Their work did not allow them to integrate their

creative skills, and they wanted to be more “strategic.” They also stressed the need to create a

community of like-minded others, especially because there was little outside recognition of the

term “service design,” which was unclear to other designers, potential clients, and competitors.

This sparked our interest in understanding the debut of service design as an occupation. We then

collated all portions of the transcripts that contained passages in which service designers talked

about themselves and their peers, either stressing the similarities between like-minded people or

highlighting their differences from other occupations. We included quotes containing

expressions of differences from other occupations, such as management consultants and

marketers, as comparisons with the two occupations arose frequently. When talking about being

designers, our informants would often refer to design practices such as observing, shadowing,

developing personas, using visuals, and developing various types of prototypes. Our observations

confirmed the importance of material work practices for service designers. We looked for

similarities among the material practices that characterized the way service designers worked.

Three main practices surfaced: doing research, visualizing, and prototyping.

At this point, we also noted that, when discussing their practices, service designers, instead of

arguing for the novelty of their tools and practices, acknowledged that they borrowed from other

disciplines. What made service designers different, they argued, was how they worked, which

influenced what they did. More specifically, many informants highlighted the importance of their

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values, which were exhibited in their work practices. Several of them referred to these values

enacted in practice as the service designers’ ethos. These insights prompted us to reanalyze our

data more closely to better understand the role of service designers’ values in constructing their

occupational mandate. We identified three main values: taking a holistic approach, being

empathetic and co-creating. Clients and consultants we interviewed mentioned similar values

when describing service designers. We also reviewed our archival data to see if these values and

material work practices appeared. Both in the LinkedIn discussions and Touchpoint issues values

and practices were mentioned as a key differentiator in the way service designers worked.

While our analysis showed both the importance of values and practices in defining the work

of service designers, we also realized that it was a challenging, if not impossible, task to clearly

separate them. Indeed, it seemed that not only could we not distinguish them, but they were in

fact deeply intertwined. Moreover, these intertwined values and practices were the way in which

service designers distinguished their newly emerging occupation from others in the field.

ENACTING A NEW ETHOS THROUGH MATERIAL WORK PRACTICES

Our informants reported that established occupations (e.g., designers, management and

marketing consultants) and potential clients (i.e., service providers) did not initially perceive and

recognize them as members of a new occupation. Thus, they had to construct an occupational

mandate in order to carve out a niche for their occupation and to differentiate it from others. This

is well articulated in one of the first Touchpoint issues:

The challenge for us is how to work our way into positions where we have, and are seen to have, something genuinely different and useful to offer alongside a range of professionals and tried and

tested approaches to problem solving and innovation.9

Indeed, members of an occupational community usually define their belonging by identifying

with those who are similar and by drawing distinctions from those who are different and do not

9 Touchpoint 1#3 - Beyond Basics (Kindle Locations 569-571). Service Design Network.

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belong to their occupation (Van Maanen and Barley 1984; Weber 1968). This need to distinguish

themselves from other occupations by a certain way of doing things was emphasized in the first

Touchpoint:

As a discipline, Service Design occupies a new space between design and marketing agencies, management consultancies and research agencies, exemplifying the virtues of people-centeredness

and co-creation as fundamental processes.10

As this quote suggests and as reported by our informants, service designers differentiated

themselves vis-à-vis two types of “others”: designers and non-designers, such as management

consultants and marketers. They did so by referring to their ethos, composed of values enacted

through material work practices.

Ethos as the main differentiator between traditional designers and management consultants

Our informants firmly grounded their work in design work practices, called themselves

designers rather than consultants, and referred to their workplace as the studio rather than the

office. However, they clarified that the difference between them and other non-designers resided

not only in design work practices, which other designers also used and that management

consultants and advertisers could always learn, but in “the attitude that [service designers] bring

in, what they value, [which] is different from agencies and marketing agencies, management

consultancies,” as Victor, senior service designer at Innovation, noted. This attitude was

explicitly mentioned by one founder of a service design consultancy in an article posted on his

firm’s website and featured in its newsletter. He defined service design as “an ethos, methods

and tool set that enables an organization or business to get a handle on how they can better

engage customers and deliver value to them.”

10

Touchpoint 1#1 - What is Service Design? (Kindle Locations 309-310). Service Design Network.

21

In other words, it was service designers’ ethos – a term our informants used to define their

work and highlight its distinctiveness – that really differentiated them from other occupations.

According to the Oxford dictionary, ethos is “the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or

community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations,” i.e., the underlying sentiment that

informs the values and practices of a group or society. Service designers’ ethos encompassed

both their values, which influenced their approach to work, and the work practices through which

they enacted their values. Thus, values and work practices informed each other: while values

defined how service designers worked, it was only in and through practice that values were

performed.

When describing what it meant to be and work as service designers, our informants

mentioned three specific values at the core of their ethos: holism, empathy, and co-creation.

Taking a holistic approach to services involved adopting a system view and understanding the

multiple actors involved in time and space rather focusing on developing just an interface or

product. Being empathetic to all stakeholders meant showing empathy for all the people they

designed for, both users and service providers. Finally, their commitment to co-creating meant

that designers worked as facilitators of the design process; they did not design independently but

co-created with a team that included users and clients. These values were what made service

designers’ work and the way they performed it distinctive and difficult to replicate.

These values were not only claimed by service designers, but they also infused three material

practices central to service designers’ work: conducting design research (collecting evidence by

using diaries, pictures, sketches, and developing personas), visualizing (using sketches, journeys,

maps, blueprints, Legos, and Playmobils), and prototyping (using paper, cardboard,

22

bodystorming,11 and role playing). Service designers signaled the importance of these practices

explicitly: most service design consultancies included in our study had a dedicated page on their

website presenting the tools they used, thus making a clear statement to potential clients.

Moreover, many articles in Touchpoint and conversations on the Service Design LinkedIn group

emphasized these three material work practices as central to service design.

The differentiating character of the ethos (i.e., values enacted through work practices) was

emphasized by service designers we interviewed and confirmed by their clients. Clients noted

that this ethos made service designers’ approach very distinctive even when working on projects

similar to those undertaken by management consultants and marketers. Service designers’ ethos

thus proved crucial in defining their occupational mandate and in differentiating them from

whom they perceived to be service design’s competing occupations, i.e., traditional designers

and non-designers.

Service designers and traditional designers

Traditional types of designers12 and their work practices represented an important reference and

point of departure for service designers. Although originally trained as designers, many of our

informants decided to migrate towards the design of services because of a deep dissatisfaction

with their jobs, which they felt were too routinized and not creative enough, and because of a

desire to be involved upstream in the innovation process. Nick, cofounder of Strategic Design,

one of the first service design consultancies, summarized this need to be more creative and

strategic:

11 Bodystorming is a technique of idea generation that involves experiencing a situation physically (usually

involving artifacts and ideas). 12

Tradit ional types of designers were referred to by our informants as a single category, encompassing designers

trained in well-established design disciplines, such as product, industrial, interaction, or graphic design.

23

We set out with a frustration about traditional design. We wanted to do things more strategically. We wanted to help organizations decide what to do and how to do it . . . using creative tools and designerly approaches.

For many this move was not easy. They reported a lack of recognition due to two

characteristics of service design: its ambiguity and its multidisciplinarity. Because services are

intangible, it is not obvious how they can be designed. In fact, this is why the first self-appointed

service designers were rejected by their peers as designers: They were no longer traditional

designers because they did not design tangible products—material or digital. Moreover, in order

to design services, practitioners needed skills from multiple fields, which made it difficult for

them to name their occupation. Thus, early practitioners of service design did not have a good

way to define their work, and some of our informants admitted that for a while they stopped

calling themselves “designers” and tried different names. Yet they ended up calling themselves

designers again because, as Erick, cofounder of Strategic Design, put it, “it has to be design. It

has to be – what else can it be? You can’t call it anything else.”

However, while defining themselves as designers when it came to their practices (design

research, visualizing, prototyping) and to some of their values (empathy in particular; and co-

creation to a certain extent), our informants claimed that they differed from traditional designers

in two ways. First, they saw their role as a facilitator of the co-creation process rather than the

figure of the solo designer. Second, their aspirations, they noted, were closer to management

consultants and marketers. In particular, going beyond implementation and moving “upstream”

to be involved in “writing the brief” were mentioned as the main motivations for their transition

to service design. These aspirations coalesced in an important value of their ethos, being holistic.

Service designers and non-designers

When comparing themselves with non-design occupations such as management

consultancies and advertising and marketing agencies, service designers conceded that they

24

worked in the same domain, i.e., helping clients to develop new or better services, brand

experiences or strategies. In fact, several informants explicitly stated that management

consultants and, in some cases, advertising and marketing agencies were their competition. They

simultaneously emphasized how specific practices made their work distinctive. As Victor, senior

service designer at Innovation, explained: “I think we'd say we’re different from the competition,

which is usually management consultancies, because we use design [practices].” Beyond design

practices, though, which could always be learned and mimicked, service designers claimed that

their values, which were exhibited in their ways of working, were a key differentiator from

management consultants and marketers.

The clients we interviewed consistently highlighted differences between service designers

and management consultants, which reflected the differentiating role of service designers’ ethos.

They made distinctions not only in terms of the service designers’ material practices – design

research, prototyping and visualizing – but also in terms of service designers’ general approach

to work, which was inspired by their values. Zeynep, senior strategy and business developer in a

civil and social organization in London, stressed how service designers’ work differed from that

of the management consultants she had worked with on other projects:

There's something very different about service designers, their methodology and their approach to work that is, I think, far more genuine about trying to actually design the service . . . So I would never again bid for any funding without engaging a service designer or a service design agency to do kind of a bottom-up design of the service.

We found that service designers re-interpreted these values in relationship to each other. In

particular, the aspiration to move upstream in the innovation process led service designers to

embrace holism as a central value, interpreted as going beyond the design of single touchpoints

for customers to encompass the entire system of touchpoints and actors involved in the creation

and delivery of services. However, as noted before, they also perceived themselves as designers,

25

and considered this as a key differentiator vis-à-vis their competition in their new scope of work

(i.e. management consultants and marketers). Therefore, they also embraced design values, such

as empathy and co-creation, but reinterpreted them in light of their holistic perspective. Hence,

their attachment to holism as a value led them to broaden their interpretation of empathy and of

co-creation in order to include not only the users but also clients and other stakeholders. In turn,

holism was not simply conceived of as a strategic or system perspective on a service, but was

imbued with a deep understanding of and empathy for different actors’contexts, practices and

needs. It also implied that all stakeholders co-created the service, not only during the design

phase, but also when the service was enacted.

In the remainder of this section, we present the three values of service designers and describe

how they are enacted through material practices. Service designers used practices of design

research, visualization and prototyping in specific ways (inspired by their values) that

demonstrate their ethos. We then explain how enacting their ethos helped differentiate service

designers from those in other occupations. The values and the material work practices that make

up service designers’ ethos should be seen as neither exhaustive nor exclusive. They are

discussed independently for analytic convenience only. In practice, they overlap and interact in

service designers’ work and, thus, in the construction of their occupational mandate. In Table 3,

we show additional evidence to support our interpretations.

----------------------------------

Insert Table 3 about here

----------------------------------

Taking a holistic approach to service

Service designers understood services as taking place over time and space among multiple

actors and touchpoints. Therefore, instead of focusing on a specific aspect of a project, as

traditional product or graphic designers do, service designers looked at a project from multiple

26

angles and at different moments in time. They considered approaching service from a holistic

perspective (sometimes referred to as understanding the “big picture” or taking a “system view”)

to be a central value that inspired their approach to work, specifically allowing them to engage

with clients as strategists. Shifting from a product or interface focus to a strategic one was the

motivation many of our informants claimed for becoming involved in service design. 13 This

holistic view of service implied that service designers needed to understand the whole context—

remembering the service provider and the different stakeholders involved, as Nick, cofounder of

Strategic Design, explained:

As a service designer you try to understand what the big picture is, and you try to help organizations join the dots up and stitch things together and help them to understand how they bring their resources to bear to deliver the right thing.

We found that holism was enacted by service designers through all three material practices:

design research, visualization, and prototyping. For example, while working with the UK

National Health System (NHS) on a project tailored to kids who have Attention Deficit

Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), service designers at Sustain and Grow realized during the

research phase that this was not only a medical problem, but also a school and parental problem.

They identified and talked to the different groups of people who usually interacted with these

children: parents, teachers, psychologists, and mental health professionals. The holistic approach

adopted in the research phase (in conjunction with an empathic understanding of each actor) led

the service design team to broaden the scope of the intended service. Indeed, although the UK

NHS was initially focused on targeting only a very small number of children affected by ADHD,

the team realized, after talking to different stakeholders, that the service could be used by a larger

13 Similarly, several Touchpoint articles highlight how service design practice has developed at a strategic level:

“Over the years, service design has moved beyond the interface and it now systematically touches strategic,

organizational and cultural issues.” Touchpoint 1#3 - Beyond Basics (Kindle Locations 158-160). Service Design

Network. Kindle Edition.

27

group of children. These children, although not diagnosed with ADHD, still had behavioral

issues that required support; they could benefit from the new service. Design research unveiled

the entire service system: It mapped the interactions between providers and users of the service

and highlighted the connections between different touchpoints where the interactions between

customers and service providers might take place.

Visualizing, especially by creating customer journeys and service blueprints based on

findings from design research, was key in helping nurture a holistic view of the service as a

system and thus envision a better service—be it an insurance policy, airport check-in, or

experience at a bank or train (see Figures 3 and 4 for examples). When recounting a project

about a new train experience, Stephen, cofounder of Future, recalled how his team developed the

“seamless journey” as a visual framework to illustrate what the new service would look and feel

like. This framework visually mapped “all of the bits of their service, all of their components, all

of the elements, all the people that you are delivering the service to.” It became a powerful

communication tool that helped all the client’s departments realize the interdependencies

between their activities in actually delivering the service and identifying organizational changes

that needed to be made so this “seamless journey” could be offered. The visualizing practice

differentiated service designers from marketers and management consultants who mostly used

PowerPoint presentations, explained Shak, one of the clients we interviewed:

We were always very impressed by the visual tools they were using to represent the complexity of the services. So that was a new element to the way that we’ve worked with consultants in the past because they’re anything but visual. Whereas I think service designers obviously presented things in very engaging ways and had lots of tools and techniques for generating conversations and thinking.

Visualizing went hand in hand with prototyping, which allowed service designers to test and

determine different aspects of a service as well as the roles of all stakeholders involved. Service

designers used prototyping to represent various parts of the system and to help clarify the

28

connection between them. This is well illustrated by a new car-sharing experience project

developed by Sustain and Grow. Prototyping for it was particularly useful for streamlining the

process and coordinating between users, the car-sharing company, and the driving and vehicle

license department. During the research phase, service designers discovered that users of the

service either dropped out at the sign- in phase or needed customer support because the process

was difficult to understand. Hence, Sustain and Grow prototyped a small booklet to help

customers during the sign-up phase. They made several versions to test different steps. Based on

users’ feedback, Sustain and Grow service designers eventually redesigned the process in four

simple steps—book, unlock, enter PIN, drive—that were visually presented in a small booklet

left in all cars and available on the website. Through prototyping, service designers also found

that a booklet with four steps was more efficient than a call-supported sign-up process.

Prototyping in this case allowed Sustain and Grow to design a solution that was user- friendly and

more efficient for the company. The process was easier for customers and it simplified

implementation for the client who would not need to be on a call with each new customer.

Our informants also emphasized the importance of taking a holistic approach as a key

differentiator between a design “only” and service design approach to developing services. For

example, designers focus on developing a touchpoint—the seats on a train or plane, a check-in

booth, a website interface to a bank or public agency—while service designers see each of these

touchpoints as part of a bigger service system involving various actors interacting to produce the

service. The holistic approach also distinguished service designers from management consultants

and marketers who were usually not interested in the end-to-end design of a service and its

implementation. Ricardo, a client of Sustain and Grow, who also had a background in

29

management consulting, emphasized the specificity of service designer’s ethos. In particular, he

credited service designers’ holistic approach as differentiating how they worked:

They were much broader, wider, and more holistic than management consultants would normally and naturally do; their net is wider and bigger in terms of their starting point and about how much do you cope with things and how much you consult with the different stakeholders.

Ricardo stresses here the importance of service designers’ holistic approach while also

suggesting that this approach worked specifically because of the role they gave to all the

stakeholders - through empathy (“their net is wider and bigger in terms of their starting point”)

and co-creation (“how much you consult with the different stakeholders”). Designers’ holistic

perspective of services allowed them to develop new service propositions while clearly

identifying what needed to be done such as applications, new products, new environments,

communication, and who needed to be involved, such as different actors who were part of the

service delivery, including the users of the service. By doing so, service designers engaged with

everyone they needed to design for and translated the service proposition into an actual service

experience.

Being empathetic with all stakeholders

Empathy, “a way of stepping into the customer’s shoes,” as many informants put it, was

frequently underscored as a second key value of the service design ethos. In fact, as Charlotte, a

service designer at Design Thinkers, explained, empathizing with all stakeholders involved in the

service delivery was crucial:

I don’t think you can be a service designer without some level of empathy not just for how customers are, but also for how people that deliver the services are. It’s very, very human-centric.

Empathy was enacted by service designers through all three material practices. In particular,

service designers explained that, during the research phase, empathy emerged through the

collection of deep insights about users and service providers. Some informants contrasted

30

empathic design research with traditional market research techniques used by management

consultants, and marketers. Victor, senior service designer at Innovation, explained how empathy

allowed him to establish trust with service users and, hence, to develop a richer understanding of

their needs and contexts than what could be achieved via formal interviews or focus groups. He

added that clients were often skeptical about the difference between market research as usually

done by management consultants and marketers and empathic design research, but when

presented with the actual findings, “They're often, like, ‘Wow, this is totally different from what

we would get from traditional [market] research.’” The difference between the two types of

research lay in the empathy informing design research, which is “much richer in terms of [service

designers] generating ideas and thinking creatively around a problem.”

Therefore, conducting design research was described as the starting point of any project, as it

provided an empathetic understanding of the context and needs of all stakeholders – both service

users and providers – in line with their holistic interpretation of services. Throughout several

projects aiming at redesigning service experiences at European airports, for instance, Strategic

Design had a team of designers shadowing people, conducting in situ interviews, and mimicking

airport experiences by adopting different roles (a mother with three kids vs. a frequent business

traveller). Not only did they focus on the passengers, but they also tried to understand the

constraints of their clients and other stakeholders through interviews, observations, and data

analysis (reviewing the number of passengers, average check- in times, or logistics processes).

For Nora, a management consultant who collaborated with service designers at Innovation on a

hospital project, this empathic, user-oriented nature of service designers’ work was notable.

Reflecting on her own practice in comparison to her experience working with service designers,

she emphasized service designers’ ab ility to empathize with patients and other stakeholders such

31

as doctors, nurses, and hospital administration. She contrasted this with the values of

management consultants, and noted that it was “a fantastic attribute that Innovation brings” to

their clients. Similarly, Iris, a manager in a public transportation company who had worked with

both service designers and management consultants, compared the way they worked:

Differently from management consultants, service designers wanted to genuinely understand the business, they didn't pretend to understand it but they wanted to learn and immerse themselves in it a lot more which I think was really important to me. Whereas often you'll have your slightly more stark consultants coming in saying, 'We know this, we understand your business, this is what we need to do.' Whereas [service designers] wanted to understand […] what [our front line staff was] like, what would interest them, what would be the challenges and they really wanted to understand the role in more detail.

To fully empathize with the service context they aimed to design, service designers

visualized the evidence collected and the insights generated during research through various

visual displays, e.g., personas, journey maps, and service blueprints. These artifacts were

displayed in service design studios. Studios were all open plan spaces featuring designers’

sharing desks and collaborating over visual displays such as photos, Post-It notes, and sketches

(see images 1 and 2). For instance, at Strategic Design, a firm we visited regularly, multiple

projects’ customer journeys and photos were pinned on the walls, and often two or three

designers were discussing or brainstorming in front of these visuals (see images 3 and 4). These

visuals represented and portrayed users in their usual contexts (i.e., from their own perspective

instead of from designers’ and service providers’ perspective), thus facilitating an empathetic

engagement of service designers with the users of the current and/or future service.

Visualizing users’ practices and contexts also helped trigger empathy in the service providers,

who were not always aware of the needs and practices of the service users. Hence, when meeting

with clients after the research phase, service designers heavily relied on visuals. Several of our

informants set up rooms with visuals to immerse the clients. Videos were also seen as powerful

for creating empathy with the service users. In this respect, John, the project manager for Maya,

32

an airline company that hired Ideate to redesign their customer experience, explained the role of

visualization techniques in fostering the empathetic engagement of Maya senior management

with the customer experience. Although Maya prided itself on its customer experience, findings

from the design research showed that customers didn’t like the long-haul flight experience.

Helping Maya senior managers step into their custome rs’ shoes, therefore, was important in

persuading them to embark in the project. To do so, the Ideate team complemented the expected

PowerPoint presentations with storybooks, photos, quotes, and an animated video of the

customer journey. John noted that all the visuals used by Ideate were critical to persuading the

executives about the issues Maya faced.

--------------------------------------

Insert images 1 to 4 about here --------------------------------------

Informants further explained that helping people imagine services through prototyping also

facilitated empathy by “making things [i.e., services] real” and promoting a better understanding

of future services. Given the inherent intangibility of services, service designers’ ability to “make

things real” through the creation of tangible artifacts and by visually communicating ideas was

often emphasized as fundamental to the service design process. For example, to test some of the

food and beverage services created by Ideate and the Maya team, they experimented on real

flights with regular boarding crew and observed how passengers reacted to each new service.

John, the Maya project manager, noted that the company had not done prototyping before and

were impressed: “It was such a powerful way of trying something out to see what it looks like.”

Ultimately, Maya implemented many innovative changes to services, equipment, processes and

technology that they had developed working with Ideate. Ideate designers claimed that this “real

33

life” prototyping not only allowed them to test, iterate, and refine the concept for themselves, but

also provided a better understanding of the actual experience for their client. Therefore,

prototyping was central to reaching a common understanding of the idea under development.

By embracing empathy through design research, visualization, and prototyping, Ideate service

designers sharply demarcated their occupation from other non-design occupations, claiming that

if, for example, management consultants were to work on the Maya project, they would focus on

the analytics behind the services provided on long-haul flights to increase their operational

efficiency and would in cost-cutting exercises instead of focusing of passengers’ real needs and

their service experience. Ideate’s distinctive way of working was also highlighted by the Maya

team who had never worked with service designers before. Because of their holistic approach,

Ideate empathized with all stakeholders involved in the travel experience instead of focusing

only on the passengers and the crew (as traditional designers would likely have done) and this

led them to redesign more than the interior of the plane, which was the original brief of the Maya

team. Ideate’s holistic approach also went hand in hand with their co-creation effort that

involved multiple stakeholders.

Co-creating with all stakeholders to design new services

Co-creating was a third core value of service designers’ ethos, and it represented a major

difference in the way they worked with respect to other design and non-design occupations. Co-

creating involved anyone from staff, executives, or users working collaboratively to design and

develop a new service. Robert, a principal at Managing Service Design, raised this point when he

contrasted the way service designers versus advertising agencies interact with clients:

We met with [the client] constantly, you know, and synthesized [the main insights] with them, so that there wasn’t this concept that it was Margot and I coming up with the bright ideas once a week that we came back and reported, which is a bit like the advertising agency model, that “you leave it to us, and we’ll come back with three suggestions, and you pick the one you like.” Instead, we engage them much more heavily.

34

Our informants underscored how involving both clients and customers in the co-creation

process was critical to their working methods and emphasized their role as facilitators. Many

Touchpoint articles noted the importance of this role:

Our recommendation to Service Designers is to be aware of the essential role of facilitation for successful behavioral change. The role of designers as facilitators and communicators has been highlighted, particularly in the co-designing process of new services.

14

Most informants also mentioned this new and essential facilitator role, noting that service design

practices required people “[to do] away with the celebrity designer and the individual,”

according to Gideon, senior research fellow at a design school. Several remarked that a facilitator

role was still quite unusual in many traditional design disciplines. In fact, the head of industrial

design at a US-based design school argued that facilitation was not the role of a designer, and

heavily criticized approaches to design that advocate co-creation.

Co-creation was also very specific to the nature of what service designers designed, namely

services rather than products. This was clearly stressed by Nick, co-founder of Strategic Design:

In product design, you just design the product. But in service design, for the service to be sustainable, you also need to build the factory that is the organization and the organizational capability.

The importance of capability building for the service to be enacted “live” increased the need for

engaging all actors in a holistic co-creation process.

Informants consistently referred to co-creation as something deeply rooted in the material

practices performed by service designers. Design research, for example, provided insights and

evidence that engaged stakeholders involved in co-creating the service: “We facilitate through

our research and through our techniques to bring the voice of the user in,” Charlotte, a principal

at Design Thinkers, explained. Some research methods, such as design probes and journals,

required the direct involvement of users and/or service providers in the research process.

14

Touchpoint 2#1 - Service Design and Behavioural Change (Kindle Locations 1051-1052). Service Design

Network. Kindle Edition

35

Co-creating often involved facilitating workshops where users and service providers were

invited to brainstorm and develop new ideas using evidence (e.g., personas, photos, and artifacts)

collected during the design research phase. For example, service designers at Innovation working

with a local government body to develop a platform of services aimed at addressing the social

care needs of the elderly population of a London borough engaged in seven co-creation

workshops involving charity organizations, district councils, local authorities, and health

providers. During these workshops, service designers shared findings from ethnographic research

as well as case studies on successful projects in other countries. Visualizing and prototyping

were the main material practices that provided rules and context for engagement in the co-

creation of new services. Visualizing ideas through sketching, customer journeys, and mapping

helped participants build a shared understanding of the envisioned service by facilitating

communication and supporting collective sensemaking. Workshop participants identified five

principles that became the main components of the new service implemented by the council.

Workshop participants praised the benefits of co-creation in terms of getting away from the

“one-organization-knows-best” model to a “highly inclusive approach where all organizations

have a role to play.” Jono, the lead commissioner of the project, explained that he decided to

work with service designers instead of management consultants because, “as a loca l authority,

we saw co-production and stakeholders’ engagement as our starting point, and service design

was for us a specific process to do that.”

Nora, the management consultant who worked with Innovation on the UK hospital project,

explained the importance of co-creation. She recalled a client’s comment during a co-creation

workshop with about eighty participants, clinicians, and politicians:

I remember the sponsor coming up to me half way through, and he was really excited. And he said, ‘You won’t believe it,’ he said. ‘For the last two years I’ve been sitting next to these people. And they’ve been fighting, fighting me all the way, and talking about hospital closures.

36

And yet we’re sitting in this room now, and we’re designing things together.’ He said, ‘This is the first time this has ever happened.’ And it absolutely comes down to the tools and techniques and the style of the facilitation that service designers used.

Prototyping was a crucial practice during these co-creation workshops. Using artifacts such as

paper, cardboard, Lego bricks, and Playmobils allowed participants to think with their hands, test

ideas by getting other participants’ input, and collaboratively develop ideas. For example, while

working on a project to redesign public services for a council in London, Strategic Design

organized a workshop where service designers, users and service providers worked in teams to

co-create possible scenarios, and then prototyped these scenarios with Lego bricks (see images 5-

7). The very simple prototypes supported the co-creation process because they helped

participants articulate and discuss their ideas with others. Specifically, workshop participants

could provide complementary insights about the context, needs, and potential resistance to the

new services. All the clients we interviewed about service designers’ work methods emphasized

the use of prototyping and visualization techniques as crucial to collaboration and ideation

during co-creation workshops.

-----------------------------------

Insert images 5-7 about here

-----------------------------------

Co-creating with all stakeholders, therefore, represents an important differentiating value of

service designers’ ethos. By enacting this value, service designers clearly set themselves apart

from other occupations, such as marketers and management consultants, who might work on

service innovation projects but with less collaboration and more of a focus on developing their

“own” idea rather than co-creating with clients and users of the service. This difference was

stressed by Zeynep, a senior strategy and business developer at a civil and social organization,

who had worked with both management consultants and service designers:

37

The experience is very different. […] I suppose my most obvious reaction would be that [management consultants] tend to be far more one dimensional and far less dynamic. So they tend to be targeted at more senior stakeholders in an organization, and I think that they engage with an organization in a way that I think service designers don’t. Service designers, because they use co-creation are far more enablers of change, and that they trust that the people it works with are the experts, and the people it works with are going to execute the change, and therefore the role of the service designer is to enable and guide that.

Moreover, expanding co-creation in line with their holistic approach also differentiated

service designers from traditional design. While some traditional designers may co-create, they

typically engage only users rather than all stakeholders and co-creation is not pro forma for all

designers. As Katia, service designer at Island, remarked:

You need to work in partnership with your client. It’s not that your client gives you a brief, and you go, okay, and you go away and you get on with your project work. It’s not the, kind of, ‘Mad Man’ model of design where the agency knows best, and you will like what we show you because we know, because we’re right.

To summarize, defining a new ethos and enacting it through material practices was

imperative for allowing service designers to construct an occupational mandate and to

differentiate themselves from other occupations. Although service designers’ ethos was central in

differentiating them from other occupations (i.e., claiming their ability to perform their work

better than other occupations competing for the same clients), its values became meaningful

when they were enacted through material work practices.

More importantly, service designers carved out a specific role for their occupation, defined

by their ability to solve strategic and systemic problems by enacting material work practices in a

way that reflected their ethos. This ethos, always embodied in material practices, was integral to

defining the proper conduct and modes of thinking evoking service designers’ occupational

mandate. The intertwinement of values and practices, at the core of service designers’ ethos, is

what allowed service designers to differentiate themselves from other occupations.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

38

While previous research on occupational emergence has focused mostly on claiming or

negotiating jurisdiction, we concentrate on the process by which members of a fledgling

occupation, such as service design, created a sense of shared mission and carved out a mandate

for themselves vis-à-vis other occupations. In this respect, we extend a small but vibrant body of

interactionist research on occupations by showing how the development of the occupational

mandate is grounded in the enactment of a new ethos, i.e., values enacted through work practices.

In doing so, we depart from existing research focusing on occupations already established or

sufficiently established to develop institutional support (e.g. Abbott, 1988; Chreim et al., 2007;

Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006; Reay et al., 2006), and we try to understand the activities that

practitioners of a fledgling occupation engage in before achieving such institutional support. In

other words, we look at how emerging occupations face the challenge of achieving social

recognition by developing an occupational mandate for their work.

This is particularly timely and important in the current work context, where the number of

new occupations is growing (Watson, 2013). Service design belongs to the set of novel

occupations that emerged when service and white-collar work became central to the economy

(Blackler, 1995; Vallas and Beck 1996; Barley 1996). Our study allows us to unpack the

occupational dynamics of the new economy by shifting attention from the field- level and

institutional environment to the interactional level and the work practices performed by members

of new occupations. We advance current understanding of how members of fledgling occupations

manage to “develop the cultural footing necessary to claim that their activities are work, that they

perform the work better than competitors, and that their skills warrant special status” (Nelsen and

Barley, 1997: 621) by highlighting the role of the ethos – values enacted through practices – in

the construction of an occupational mandate.

39

We show how service designers’ ethos was dynamically enacted vis-à-vis two other groups of

occupations, designers on the one hand, management consultants and marketers on the other

hand. Service designers’ ethos includes three main values –holism, empathy and co-creation –

which were reinterpreted by service designers in order to better differentiate themselves.

Originally, service designers aimed to differentiate themselves from designers as they desired

their work to be more strategic and upstream than traditional designers and, thus, holism was

crucial to the construction of their occupational mandate. However, to different iate themselves

from management consultants’ and marketers’ strategic approaches, they were also faithful to

design values, such as empathy and co-creation, that they reinterpreted holistically to include all

stakeholders involved in the service, and not only the users, as traditional designers tend to do.

Moreover, empathy and co-creation also influenced the holistic perspective taken by service

designers. Indeed, being holistic was more than taking a strategic or system view, which can be

associated with management consultants, as such a view could potentially be quite top-down and

disembodied. Because of their empathetic engagement with all stakeholders, service designers’

holism was deeply grounded in specific uses and practices from different users in various

contexts. Because of their belief in co-creation, service designers’ view of holism aimed to set the

stage for various co-creation activities to take place.

This paper, thus, makes two major contributions to the literature on occupations and work.

First, it illuminates how values play a role in the construction of an occupational mandate,

especially when skills and expertise are not the main differentiating factor. Second, it highlights

the role of work practices in enacting an occupational mandate and suggests that the distinction

between values and work practices is merely analytical. In an ethos, values and material work

practices are intrinsically connected: material practices as enacted by service designers were

40

“embodied values.” While the ethos existed only as enacted in and through practice, material

practices were differentiating only when they were enacted in a way congruent with service

designers’ ethos.

The differentiating role of values in the construction of an occupational mandate

Our study highlights that what really differentiates service designers from other occupations

are their values or what Abbott (1988) defines as the subjective construal of the work. While

Abbott (1988) acknowledges that values might help practitioners develop a feeling of

distinctiveness, he also claims that, in the twentieth century, values played a decreasing role in

legitimizing work domains. Among the armed forces, Abbott (1988: 191) quips, “only the

Marines are still looking for a few good men,” and he argues that occupations primarily leverage

technical expertise and skill as sources of legitimacy. While he may be correct in asserting the

declining importance of occupational claims based on broad moral character, we find that values

are still, and may be increasingly, important sources of differentiation for nascent occupations. If

we consider occupations as constituted of “sets of relationships that are social as well as

technical” (Hughes, 1984: 294), and if members of an occupation “collectively . . . presume to

tell society what is good and right for it in a broad and crucial aspect of life” (Hughes, 1984:

288), it is essential that we understand the role of values in defining an occupational mandate.

Some studies (Barley, 1983; Nelsen and Barley, 1997; Arndt and Bigelow, 2005; Anteby,

2010) have started to emphasize the role of values in understanding distinctions between

occupations. In line with these studies, we have found that values are critical to the construction

and enactment of an occupational mandate. This is particularly important at the early stages of an

occupation’s development, when finding like-minded colleagues and developing a sense of

shared mission and meaning is crucial (Bucher, 1962, 1988). Nascent occupations are not yet at

41

a stage where they can use some of the legitimation strategies suggested by the literature on

professions, such as closure of membership (Halpern, 1992; Begun and Lippincott, 1987),

because they do not have access to the resources to enact them. However, they still aim to

construct an occupational mandate. Therefore, our study casts light on the pre- institutionalization

phase of new occupations, demonstrating that nascent occupations leverage values and practices

as a legitimization strategy when they lack institutional means for supporting their jurisdiction.

Moreover, we show that values, as well as skills and knowledge, are essential in

distinguishing work. This is particularly relevant when skills and expertise are not key

differentiators between two groups, in both new or institutionalized occupations. Our findings

show that service designers were not shy to admit that their work incorporates methods and tools

from a variety of other occupations. As Steve the co-founder of Sustain and Grow explained,

“[Service design] was really a combination of knowledge developed in different fields –

marketing, HCI, branding and so on. We took the best out of the fields we knew. ” In other

words, service designers merged various practices to create their service design toolkit:

borrowing some practices from designers (e.g. visualizing, prototyping), others from

management consultants (e.g. strategic analysis, facilitation skills) and creating some specific

tools like service ecosystem maps and experience prototypes. They incorporated these practices

within a set of values that shaped their way of working. We might expect that members of

emerging occupations who cannot solely rely on skills and technical expertise as sources of

differentiation will take a similar approach to service designers’ in developing their mandates,

that is combining elements (methods, or tools, e.g.) from other occupations to define their

practices in a way that is aligned with their unique set of values, framing how they work, which

they see as the core differentiator for their occupational mandate.

42

Sometimes even in institutionalized fields, groups of like-minded individuals with similar

work interests and practices are not able to define a set of formal standards to support an

occupational mandate. For example, Baszanger (1990) shows that, even in medicine,

subspecialties are no longer clearly distinguishable by the work that they do. She describes the

emergence of “doctors of pain”: an occupation that draws on multiple subspecialties of doctors

and other medical practitioners who treat chronic pain. This group of like-minded colleagues has

a particular ethos around the treatment of chronic pain, which unites them, yet they are still

divided by subspecialty. They have no recognizable occupational title or code, and struggle to be

recognized by medical institutions in France. Zetka’s study (2011) of the battle between

gynaecologic oncologists and gynaecologic pelvic surgeons to be recognized as a subspecialty of

American ob/gyn demonstrates a similar dynamic. While both occupations shared surgical skills

and expertise, the pelvic surgeons’ claims for jurisdiction were resisted because they presented

their occupational mandate under a mechanical surgery ethos rather than a holistic, patient-

centered, “obstetric point of view” (2011: 841). Hence, the oncologists’ mandate was recognized

not because of their skills and expertise but because of the values they stood for.

Similarly, members of occupations like executive coaching, psychotherapy, and workplace

counseling come from different backgrounds and traditions and have slightly different tools and

techniques. Yet, their methods are overlapping and all aim to assess individuals’ behaviors and

emotions in organizational contexts and to support them in reaching their goals. In this unclear

and evolving occupational arena, the main boundary between these groups lays in their values:

their general attitude towards clients and how they perceive their relationship to them. Values

become particularly important as distinguishing elements in circumstances where the task or

technology is less salient in the definition of occupations. As Damarin (2006) highlights in her

43

study of web work, many emerging occupations do not hew to ideal- typical definitions but

appear as broader and less uniform categories. Thus, what is distinct about web work is not

workers’ mastery of a set of digital skills needed to perform their tasks but its flexible and

modular nature, involving changing combinations of multiple tasks and skills. In line with our

findings, Damarin notes the loyalty of web workers to the value of “the Web as a community and

a project” (2006: 457). We would expect that other new occupations which cannot distinguish

themselves by task or technology would rely more on values as a source of differentiation and

legitimation. Our study starts to explore the role of values in how service designers construct

their occupational mandate, but more such studies are required, particularly because the

boundaries between occupations are in constant flux and skills and knowledge may no longer be

the main differentiating dimension. In this context, understanding how members of nascent

occupations construct an occupational mandate in order to then develop legitimacy and

institutional support proves particularly important to enrich current understandings of

occupational dynamics.

The intertwining of values and practices

As noted by Bucher (1988: 134), “inquiry into the emergence of new occupations has focused

on looking for ‘causes.’” Most studies of emerging occupations indeed focus on the triggers that

prompt the emergence of new occupations, highlighting the role of new technologies, skills, or

organizational forms (Abbott, 1988; Zetka, 2003; Hughes, 1984; Bucher, 1988). Yet, as Bucher

(1988) stresses, irrespective of what instigates their emergence, all occupations must go through a

developmental process that always starts with “discovering colleagueship” (Bucher, 1988: 136)

and constructing an occupational mandate that defines proper conduct, modes of thinking, and

beliefs (Hughes, 1984). However, while highlighting the importance of this process, interactionist

44

scholars have not unpacked how it actually happens. In this paper, we focus on the construction

of a mandate, the values it involves, and its enactment in practice. Our study provides solid

empirical ground for understanding how values and practices are recursively linked to each other

in the enactment of an ethos.

Our findings on the role of ethos in the construction of service designers’ occupational

mandate suggests that future studies should not only concentrate on the triggers of emerging

occupations such as technology and new skills, but also consider the social and cultural

construction of the occupation through the values that its members refer to and, most importantly,

enact in their work practices. Our analysis of service designers’ ethos illustrates how values and

practices are intrinsically intertwined. Values without “walking the talk” are but empty words;

practices without a sense of mission and meaning can be reproduced by anyone. Service

designers’ occupation was distinguished not just by the set of practices they mastered, but also by

their ability to discern how and when to use (and adapt) this set of practices for a specific project.

This ability to choose the right set of practices in the service design repertoire (many of which

were borrowed from other disciplines), as well as to apply them with a certain ethos, was a key

differentiator for service designers. Hence, to become a service designer, mastering material

work practices is not enough; one must also adopt the ethos that enables their successful use.

The role of practices as a key element in the construction of an occupational mandate provides

an important contrast to the literature on professions’ institutionalization (Abbott, 1988), which

emphasizes the central role of official certification, formal education, and abstract knowledge in

developing an occupation. Service designers’ lack of abstract knowledge and certification creates

a lot of uncertainty about their skills. Service designers thus use their repertoire of work practices

in their work, on their websites, and in their client presentations to demonstrate their skills and

45

expertise. This also serves to reassure clients about the intangible aspects of the service design

process. For example, successful service design projects imply mastery of specific practices, such

as doing design research, visualizing and prototyping. Service designers claimed jurisdiction over

those practices, as our informants illustrated, telling us that “this is designers’ stuff.” By

demonstrating this use of practices to create a mandate, our findings support and build upon

studies which show the importance of material practices enacted by members of established

occupations who are trying to change or protect their jurisdiction (Anteby, 2010, Bechky, 2003,

Zekta, 2003; Nelsen and Barley, 1997).

However, work practices, while important in the construction of service designers’

occupational mandate, represent only one aspect of the occupational mandate. Hence, to become

a service designer, mastering work practices is not enough. One could argue, for example, that

you could just go to a service design consultancy’s website and steal their methods or take a

course in design thinking to become a service designer. In fact, our informants did not mind

sharing the methods they used on a blog, a website or even in a workshop. For them, what was

distinctive in their work was not their practices, but their ethos, i.e. how their values infused their

work. This points to the intertwinement of practices and values, illustrating how “meanings and

materiality are enacted together” (Orlikowski 2010: 135) in the construction of an occupational

mandate. Galison (1999) makes a similar point about the intricate relationship between values

and material practices in his study of scientific objectivity. Like service designers, laboratory

scientists’ moral and epistemological beliefs and technical practices emerged simultaneously.

This was seen in the ways their inscriptions of findings in texts and images changed over time.

This comparison highlights a methodological contribution of our study. Values, by their very

nature, are difficult to study, and exploring material practices and inscriptions may provide a

46

fruitful entry point for these investigations, opening up new possibilities for research on

occupational change. One way to deepen our understanding about the role of values in creating

occupational legitimacy is to incorporate a richer understanding of work practices. As Nelsen and

Barley (1997) note, for instance, occupations’ early practitioners may not be very articulate and

intentional in the construction of their mandate. Therefore, explicitly attending to their work

practices provides a way to explore and unveil their values as well as the role that these values

play in the construction of occupational legitimacy. Doing so would highlight the tensions and

alignments between the public strategies and actions of occupations (Kronus, 1976; Halpern,

1992; Power, 1997; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005) and the way they enact their values in

everyday practice.

While extant research on occupations provides rich accounts of the jurisdictional strategies

enacted by members of occupations that have already achieved institutional support, we know

much less about the practices enacted by occupational members prior to this. Our exploration of

service designers’ ethos focuses attention on the importance of intertwined values and practices

in the construction of an occupational mandate. Especially given the state of occupational flux in

our current economy, new occupations cannot rely only on skills, expertise and technology for

claims of legitimacy. As a result, defining, solidifying and maintaining an occupational

jurisdiction might hinge on the ability of these occupations to differentiate their values and

practices. Understanding the role of the ethos therefore provides complementary analytic

leverage to unpack the complexity of occupational dynamics.

47

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52

Table 1. Interview summary table

First Round (Feb-August 2010) Second Round (May 2012 -

August 2012)

Third Round (Sept – Dec. 2014)

John, cofounder of Sustain & Grow,

and independent service designer

Phoebe, service designer, Made

Together

Mark, cofounder and director of

Sustain & Grow

Mark, cofounder and director of

Sustain & Grow

Kim, strategic and service designer Victor, senior service designer at

Innovation

Steve, cofounder and director of

Sustain & Grow (2)

Robert, principal and service

designer in a service design

consultancy

Emile, service designer, Innovation

Martin, service designer, Sustain &

Grow

Milena, assistant professor of

social innovation and service

design

Nora, management consultant

Nick, cofounder, Strategic Design Kristen, service designer and

social innovator

Ricardo, senior manager in a public

transportation company

Erik, cofounder, Strategic Design Charlotte, principal and service

designer, Design Thinkers

Iris, manager in a public transportation

company

Toby, senior service designer,

Strategic Design

Ashley, service design lead, Island Shak, director in a social care

nonprofit organization

Luke, principal, Strategic Design (2) Katia, service design lead, Island Manuela, manager in an engineering

and service company

Lindsey, service designer, Strategic

Design

Nelson, service designer at an

innovation and web agency

Dario, managing director of an

insurance company

Daniel, principal, Strategic Design Gideon, senior research fellow at a

design school

Jono, director of a UK local authority

Don, service designer, Strategic

Design

Elizabeth, service design

researcher and communication

strategy consultant

Zeynep, senior strategy and business

developer at a civil and social

organization

Janelle, service designer, Strategic

Design

Sherry, independent service design

strategist

Gabriel, innovation and customer

experience lead at an international

bank

Victor, senior service designer,

Innovation

Ed, cofounder, People Focus

Stephen,

cofounder and strategic director,

Future (2)

Alan, head of service design

master’s at the Royal College of

Art

Josh, senior service designer, Future

(2)

Sam, cofounder of a service design

consultancy

Juliette, cofounder and director, Spot Lucy, interaction and service

design consultant

Denis, cofounder and director, Spot John, project manager, Maya

Hannah, independent service designer

(former head of service design at a

major design and innovation

consultancy)

Stephan, senior designer, Ideate

(lead designer on the Maya

project)

Bill, chief design officer, Design

Council

Marlo, independent service designer

Alexis, founder and director, Beyond

Private

25 (21 informants) 18 12 (10 informants)

55 (49 informants)

53

Table 2. Data sources and use

Data source Type of data Use in the analysis

Intensive Data Collection

Interviews 53 in-depth interviews with:

(a) Service designers(b) Clients and management consultants

Understand the development of the occupation of service design with a

focus on how service designers perceived their occupation, and gain a

deep understanding of their work practices by using evidence from

specific projects.

Identify the main values and material practices

Capture the clients and management consultants’ perceptions about

service designers’ work and enrich our emerging interpretations.

Observations Field notes from visits to service design studios and from attending

brainstorming sessions and internal knowledge-sharing meetings

Understand the use of the tools and methods used by service designers

Identify the three main material practices

Ongoing Data Collection

Observations Field notes from attendance at:

(a) Social events organized by service designers, e. g. “Service

Design Thinks and Drinks,” “Service Design Salon”

(b) Service design conferences, seminars, and workshops, e.g.,

Service Design Conference, Global Service Jam)

Familiarize with service designers and the service design community

Establish trust with informants

Collect stories related to service design projects that informants worked

on

Archival data (a) 18 issues of Touchpoint (April 2009 – December 2014), the

international journal of service design published by the SDN. [In-

depth analysis of the first nine issues (volume 1:1 to volume 3:3)]

(b) LinkedIn Service Design Group (more than 9, 500 members)

since its creation in 2010 to December 2014. We focused on the 50

messages that were the most commented and / or liked.

(c) Press articles, corporate brochures, books, pamphlets, websites,

blogs, and internal and external presentations intended for specific

projects.

Triangulate, support and integrate the evidence derived from interviews

and observations.

Informal

conversations

Regular informal conversations with service designers, traditional

designers and design academics.

Share our provisional interpretations and gain further feedback.

54

Table 3. Representative quotes supporting our interpretations

Values of the

New Ethos Service Designers’ Practices

Conducting design research

Visualizing Prototyping

Being

empathetic

We do everything [to gain empathy] from

observing people in their homes to taking

journeys, pretending to be different types of

user or personas. Going to an airport, for

example, and pretending to be partially

sighted or pretending to be with a family or

lost and then giving each other prompts like,

“You have five minutes to catch your flight”

or “You need to meet someone, but your

mobile phone doesn’t work abroad.”

Josh, senior service designer, Future

The only way I was going to really

understand this was by shadowing the

people, being a volunteer and doing the

jobs, and then speaking to people. And then

that way I could really understand what the

problems were. And from that I was able to

draw up a list of the different challenges that

were faced, and then be able to speak to the

volunteers and say: “Look, this is my point

of view. This is what I gained. What do you

think?” And although things were slightly

different, at the end of the day, they all kind

of boiled down to the same problems.

Kristen, service designer and social

innovator

This last week in this project we’ve done

with these hotels, we’ve been doing a

whistlestop tour of going around and having

tours of hotels, and just to be in there, it just

I think we made 117 little v ignettes and

sketches of all the possible Orange interactions

of the future. We made a massive sketchbook

for [the clients], and then we edited it down to

ten that we really brought to life. We spent a lot

of time creat ing stuff that felt like it really

existed. That’s why the project was called

Tangible Evidence of Orange’s Future.

John, cofounder, Sustain & Grow

It’s all very visual, and that helps us to map

stuff and understand it. It’s important to clients

because it is . . . again, it’s inspirational to them,

it helps them to make connections, it’s

enjoyable. They like to see . . . they don’t like

seeing PowerPoint slides and words; they can’t

get it. They’re visual people, too . . . They love

it to see their ideas brought to life. And then,

again, when you’re going out to customers, it ’s

easy for them to see and understand.

Nick, cofounder, Strategic Design

I think one of the more powerful ways is to . . .

When you’re first presenting the proposition,

the princip les will be beneath there. I think one

of the most powerful ways is to just bring back

the actual user footage and the research. If you

have a film where somebody’s saying, I just

feel that in my local community I can’t say the

things I want to say, but I want to make a

difference and I want to make things better, but

I don’t seem to have anywhere to say these

So prototyping propositions means we've

got a bunch of things, and [the clients and

the users] can look at them and go: “Oh, I

get that,” or you can say something like:

“Well, how does it work?” And they go:

“Oh yes, well, what it does is it does this

and that.” Even though you haven't written

it. But you're starting to get them to reveal

stuff.

Juliette, cofounder, Spot

So as soon as you have an idea for a service

design project like: “I really think we can

improve the experience of standing in this

queue,” in order to better articulate that

idea you have to create props, you have to

create stuff. You have to create all the

ephemera that live around it so that you can

get a sense of the mood and the feel of that

experience as a client, as a stakeholder, so

that you have things to talk about, so that

you have things to share.

Janelle, service designer, Strategic Design

The idea of showing a rough model before

the thing’s finished. They don’t finish the

thing and then try and sell it, they try it out

with you to get feedback. So, it’s a

sophisticated trial and error process of

learning that’s the difference.

Denis, cofounder, Spot

55

makes it so much . . . you could have read a

report about what happens, but, actually, it’s

not until you see it and experience it that

you actually begin to own it and understand

it.

Nick, cofounder, Strategic Design

things, that’s really important. That’s your user

saying things.

Josh, senior service designer, Future

Taking a

holistic

approach

One of the reasons we go out into the field

and research things and bring back artifacts,

evidence, photos, videos, scripts, is to be

able to share that with the team, and we'll

often map all of that kind of stuff on some

kind of journey so that you can understand

what is happening, where it's happening, but

most importantly when it's happening,

because the thing about services, yes, they're

often intangible, but they also take place

over time so that the time dimension is

incredibly important.

Luke, service design principal, Strategic

Design

[when referring to the research phase of a

project with a b roadcasting company] So we

look at all the research that we’ve done on

their audiences, we look at their strategies,

the paper documents they have for the future

of the network. At the start we have this

orientation phase that is always about using

the research to develop a bigger point of

view or a bigger perspective on what’s the

current situation with your network, how do

you perceive it to be? How do you perceive

your audience to be, what are their issues,

their needs; what’s the core offering of your

network and what are the service qualities

that help to show that offering to the

audience?

Lindsey, service designer, Strategic Design

One of our expert ise as service designers is that

we can visualise, and we have a lot of emphasis

on the visualisation of the system that they're

working with in, to help them [the clients] see

things that they might not necessarily be ab le to

see from within the system, so the visualisation

and the artefact does become really important.

Robert, service design principal

[when talking about the importance of

visualizing a service system] But whether that

be mapping out a route or a journey or a

conceptual model or a map, they all serve to

gain and help understanding about the entire

service system. In the same way that metaphors

can explain a complex viewpoint or a complex

problem, it [visualizing] is that hook, those

visual stories help you understand what it is that

you’re trying to achieve. Which is why, you

know, you might have KPIs or you might have

use cases, but when you bring it to life with user

journeys, that’s when you can start to see how

it’s working, and maybe challenge it.

Katia, service design lead, Island

Those who are doing it best have had the

schematic thinking, system thinking augmented

by a way to visually extract that (…) I do think

that one of the important differentiating

character aspects for anyone with design in their

name is that you do need to be able to leverage

When we prototype a service, we need to

understand how the [whole service] system

might be in order to create that credit card

for example; and I need to be able to draw

informat ion from mult iple elements [of the

system] in order to deliver on the

experience. The interesting thing about

prototyping services is actually building in

services holistically, which most service

organisations still don’t do, because of the

silos

Hannah, independent service designer

I can exp lain something to you, but if I can

show you and you can see it, you’ll get it

quicker, easier and it’ll hold it in your

mind. Because if you’re talking about an

intangible thing such as a service system,

you need to make it tangible in some way,

and especially if it involves different

people and processes and stuff.

Katia, service design lead, Island

I then get stuck into actually making that

happen from a business perspective and an

experiential perspective, and ends up in

going right the way through to prototypes

and specification documents and stuff like

that.

Nick, cofounder, Strategic Design

56

It never really appealed to me as much as

being able to think about your whole

experience and to be (…) saying, I will

speak for these people. You’re kind of an

unelected representative. There’s a g roup of

users and you’re the person who’s fighting

their cause but at the same time you’re

working for a client, whether they be a

council or a s mall business or a b ig

business. So, somet imes there’s a

disagreement because you have to say, I

know what you’re p roviding but your users

want something different, they’re not

satisfied with it, they want this or that.

Josh, senior service designer, Future

not just words but visual thinking in order to

explain.

Lucy, service design consultant and design

strategist

Co-creating

We facilitate [co-creation workshops]

through our research and through our

techniques to bring the voice of the user

in . . .

Charlotte, service design principal, Design

Thinkers When you’re going out into the field and

you’re talking to a customer, you need to

talk in their language so you really have to

be mult ilingual in that respect. The designer

is a facilitator of the [co-creat ion] process in

terms of a facilitator can’t just go up there

and browbeat everybody into how they

understand things.

Charlotte, service design principal, Design

Thinkers We developed a package of “auto-

ethnographic video probes” that we gave to

the participants during a workshop. The

package included a small USB video

camera, with which we asked participants to

record film clips over a two-week period.

In the last [co-creation workshop] I worked on,

we came up with a series of photographs and a

series or words to help prompt people to think

about who it was they were talking about; so

you could either give them a photograph of a

famous person, or someone they could relate to,

that makes them think about their service in a

different way, or put themselves in someone

else’s shoes. And that type of thing is quite

successful. Or you know, or get them to think

about the situation that you’re talking about,

from someone else’s point of view.

Kristen, service designer and social Innovator

We just talk about sketches, and we teach our

clients to sketch. We do very quick workshops

to break their fear of drawing and then we get

them involved. We have these little basic

templates as well, so we have people at a table

talking with outline drawings for them to fill in

or catch them holding a mobile phone. So, if

they’re really nervous it’s not totally blank

sheets of paper.

And then the whole process is extremely

collaborative. So there’s this . . . the work

that we’re doing with Eurostar, again, a lot

of front-end research, a lot of journey

mapping, figuring out what the important

things were to their passengers and then

working . . . going through a series of co-

creation workshops with staff and

passengers to explore how to actually

improve things, so making it very . . . so

we do a lot of gaming, I think, to help to

create things. So desktop prototyping, help

with trying to explore scenarios .”

Nick, cofounder, Strategic Design

When I did the Inspire Foundation piece of

work, what we ended up doing was a series

of workshops where people would take the

principles of the strategy, and then apply it

to their area of work, and generate their own ideas and their own draft pieces of

content, and prototype what thecontent and

the service would look like on

57

Touchpoint 1#3 - Beyond Basics (Kindle

Locations 241-242). Serv ice Design

Network.

John, cofounder, Sustain & Grow

And so [during co-creation wokrshops] we

were, you know, we were white boarding and

we . . . it’s a cliché, but I love a good

whiteboard and a poster – they’re so useful for

helping you think and visualise. And we’d

sketch storyboards or people moving around the

screen or anything artistic – it was words on a

whiteboard, but . . . it’s the way that we

visualise things so that more than one person

can be involved in that conversation.

Charlotte, service design principal, Design

Thinkers

the basis of the principles.

Sherry, service design strategist and

consultant

These workshops focused on ‘learning

through doing,’ with participants building

on their collective experience to co-create

new tools and methods for specific

engagement challenges in their daily

practice.

Touchpoint 3#1 - Leaning, Changing,

Growing. (Kindle Locations 465-467).

Service Design Network.

58

Images 1 and 2: Pioneer studio: post-its and visuals from current projects on the walls

Images 3 and 4: Mapping the journey

Images 5, 6, and 7: Co-creation session organized by Strategic Design

59

Appendix

Table 1. List of the tools used by service designers

Name Description Use

Shadowing Shadowing involves researchers immersing

themselves in the lives of customers, front-line

staff, or people behind the scenes in order to

observe their behaviours and experiences,

through videos, pictures, notes, etc.

Shadowing is used to allow designers to

identify when, how, and why problems arise

during a customer experience and to develop

empathy for how users experience the service.

By doing so, it provides a deep understanding

of the real-t ime interactions that take place

between the various groups and touchpoints

involved.

Contextual

interviews

Contextual interviews are conducted with

customers, staff, and other relevant

stakeholders within the environment in which

they interact with the service.

Contextual interviews are used to help the

interviewees remember the specific details that

usually get lost in traditional focus group

settings. They allow researchers to gain a deep

understanding of the social and physical

environment surrounding the service, which

helps generate a more holistic understanding.

Design

Probes

Design probes (sometimes also called cultural

probes) are informat ion gathering packages,

usually given by the design team to users to

record aspects of their lives for a prolonged

period of time. The design probe may include

diaries, question cards, postcards, disposable

cameras, or other tools for mapping and

drawing.

Based around the princip le of user-

participation via self-documentation, design

probes are used in the design research phase to

generate personal insights directly by the users.

They allow to unravel people’s beliefs and

desires, as well as to create detailed accounts of

people’s lives. By doing so, they allow

designers to understand users’ perspective

“first hand” and to engage users in the research

and indirectly in the design process.

Personas Personas are fict ional profiles, developed as a

way of representing a particular group of users

based on their shared interests. They represent

a character with which client and service

design team can engage. They are created by

collating research insights into common-

interest groupings that are then developed into

workab le characters. Different techniques—

from visual representations to anecdotal

profiles,—can be used to bring these characters

to life.

Personas provide a range of different

perspectives on a service, allowing service

design teams to define and engage the different

groups that may exist within their target

market. Personas shifts focus away from

demographics towards the needs of real

customers.

Stakeholder

maps

Stakeholder maps are v isuals representations of

the various groups involved with a particular

service and the relationships among them. They

are first created by compiling a complete list of

all the stakeholders and then identifying and

visually representing how they are related to

each other and how they interact with each

other.

The overview provided by stakeholder maps is

a way to visually highlight the issues

concerning each stakeholder group so that the

service provider can deploy their resources

more effectively when responding to problems

and expanding their service.

Journey

maps

Journey maps (also called customer journey or

experience journey maps) are v isualizations of

a service user’s experience. The touchpoints

where users interact with the service are used to

construct a journey based upon their

By provid ing a representation of the user’s

experience and of the factors influencing it

(e.g., behaviors, emotions, expectations, etc.),

customer journey maps enable the

identification of both problems and

60

experience. The journey details the services

interactions and the emotions typically

experienced by users.

opportunities for innovation. These visual

representations make it possible to compare

different users’ experiences and to facilitate a

holistic experience of users’ whole journey.

Service

blueprints

Service blueprints are a way to specify and

detail each aspect of a service through a visual

schematic representation of the perspectives of

users, service providers , and other relevant

parties. They are produced collaboratively by

bringing together the various departments or

teams (often during co-creation workshops )

that exist within the organization of the service

provider,.

Service blueprints are used to identify the

crucial areas of a service, as well as areas of

overlap and duplication. They promote co-

operation and teamwork and help the service

provider coordinate people and resources.

Storyboards Storyboards are series of drawings or pictures

that visualize a particu lar sequence of events

(e.g., a common situation where a service is

used, the hypothetical implementation of a new

service prototype). Storyboards are usually

constructed using the comic-strip format in

which designers create a series of illustrations

that tell the story of the situation being

examined.

Service designers use storyboards to tell stories

about user experiences and to convey the key

aspects of a service. They are a type of rapid

prototype used to provoke meaningful analysis,

spark discussions about problems, and possible

solutions among the design team and between

the team, users, and clients.

Design

scenarios

Design scenarios are detailed hypothetical

stories, created to explore a particular aspect of

a service offering. Design scenarios can be

presented using plain text, storyboards, or even

videos. Research insights are used to construct

a plausible situation around which the scenario

can be based. Personas can be incorporated

within the scenario in order to focus the

situation around a clearly defined character.

Design scenarios can be used in almost any

stage of a service design project, as they help

review, analyze, and understand the driving

factors that define a service experience. They

are often the results of co-creation workshops.

Experience

prototypes

Experience prototypes are simulation of service

experiences. They usually take the form of

mock-ups of the service system. They can vary

in terms of tone and complexity from in formal

“role play”-style conversations to more detailed

full scale recreations involving user

participation, props, and physical touchpoints.

Experience prototypes help service designers

generate a deep understanding of a service

based on “learning by doing ,” create tangible

evidence on which solutions can be founded,

and iterate design solutions, as they can be

used to quickly test and refine ideas.